Commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

My recommendation for preaching Maundy Thursday is not to “preach on” 1 Corinthians, but to use Paul’s strategy in crafting 1 Corinthians 11 to bring the presence of Christ palpably among your own people while preaching on the dramatic gospel from John 13 and leaving room for the liturgy itself to preach. The meals are not the same in the Gospel and the epistle, but Maundy Thursday commemorates both the institution of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23–26) and the foot-washing mandate (John 13:14–15). 

Whether you expand the reading for that evening or not, I suggest you familiarize yourself with at least 1 Corinthians 11:20–29. By adding the verses before and after the lectionary reading, you can see how skillfully Paul brings together the Lord’s Supper narrative with its moral implication of attention to those with the least power and status, thus bringing together Eucharist and foot-washing. 

Those who attend the Maundy Thursday services generally come for the very sense of intimacy with Christ that Paul conveys as he focuses simply and intently on the words of Jesus: “This is my body that is for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Each word is intended to drop into the hearts and consciences of the hearers.

1 Corinthians 11:23–25

These verses are the powerful rhetorical center of 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, where the presence of Christ himself is brought into the midst of the congregation as they listen to the letter being read.

• For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you: One of the first things we notice in verse 23 is Paul’s sense of immediacy with Christ in the receiving and passing on of his words. It is that intimacy and urgency of Jesus’s words that he intends to pass on to the Corinthians as both assurance and challenge.

Now Paul entrusts his hearers with the treasure. He wants to be sure that the assembly understands the full implications of Jesus’s statements, because they will be the foundation for their acts of living remembrance.

• This is my body that is for you: This statement sums up how Jesus lived and ministered. He had a body that was profoundly “for” others—for me, for you— God’s means of compassionate presence and care. The body of Christ that is the community of the baptized is likewise a body for others. This is the heart of Paul’s message in 1 Corinthians as a whole, and most particularly in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 (see especially the importance of “discerning the body” at 11:29).

• This cup is the new covenant in my blood: There are several places where Paul echoes Jeremiah in his letters, and this is likely one of them: “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days [the deportation to Babylon and destruction of Jerusalem], says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:33–34).

The intimacy of the people around the Maundy Thursday meal extends to intimacy and mutual knowing of God. For Paul, genuine knowledge of God is love of God and, even more importantly, being loved by God: “We know that “all of us possess knowledge.” Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him” (1 Corinthians 8:1b–3).

Maundy Thursday is an occasion for immersing the congregation in God’s unbounded love, especially on the eve of Good Friday.

• Do this in remembrance of me: What is “this” that the community is to do in remembrance? The obvious connection is with how they commemorate the Lord’s Supper. When they do so, they are to recall Jesus’s words: “This is my body that is for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But the remainder of the passage will suggest a much wider frame of reference for re-membering Jesus in daily life.

1 Corinthians 11:26 and beyond

• For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes: Paul keeps his interpretation of the Lord’s Supper closely tied to the crucifixion. By ending the reading here, the lectionary stays very closely focused on Christ and honors the unfolding of the liturgical sequence of Maundy Thursday – Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter. But it misses the practical moral implications that were Paul’s original point.

• When you come together to eat: Paul is concerned that “when you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper” (11:20), because the assembly is just repeating the social norms of the surrounding culture. Those who have plenty arrive early to the shared meal, and by the time day laborers or small shop owners arrive with whatever they might be able to contribute, the early comers have drunk and eaten their fill (“one goes hungry and another becomes drunk,” 11:21). 

The dramatic presentation of Jesus’s words and the seriousness of all that he gave his life for are summed up by very precise corrections to how this congregation should honor Christ at the Lord’s Supper: “My brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation.”

• This teaching seems so small compared to the drama of Christ’s words at the table, and his impending death. But it underscores the centrality, the holy necessity of the body of Christ, the church, living as Christ in every detail of daily life.

• The calling of the baptized to live as Christ is the daunting mystery that underlies all of Holy Week: that there is a holy death to the self that is linked by unfathomable love to all that will rise by the power of God.

Resources

I have spent a lot of time with this beautiful passage. I explore it in depth in a chapter of my book Keeping the Feast: Metaphors of Sacrifice in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, Early Christianity and Its Literature 16 (Atlanta: SBL, 2015).